Notice anything about the above image? It looks like a Facebook feed and five of the nine content pieces (only three are fully visible), are videos. The image is a screen capture from Goldman Sachs’ homepage – part of a modernization/ outreach effort under new Goldman CEO David Solomon.

Below we highlight several examples of companies that imaginatively use content. We focused on Websites as opposed to social media pages as many companies view their Website experience as an afterthought and doing so carries significant opportunity cost. Websites typically have less than 10 seconds to make an impression before users move on.

1.) Goldman Sachs: the company uses content to tell a story and to provide direct access to CEO David Solomon. Congrats to a company in an unsexy space deploying engaging content to its benefit.

2.) Red Bull: perhaps the best pound-for-pound content delivery company. RB homepage is video-driven, tells stories and mimics a social media feed while optimized for the mobile experience. https://www.redbull.com/us-en/

Key takeaways:

Engage visually – especially with video. Important both in terms of capturing viewers’ attention and also in terms of providing access to senior management. It’s up to you what video content you want to post publicly, although the world is becoming increasingly transparent. As CEO why wouldn’t you want to make time for regular, short-form video content that keeps employees (most important), customers (2nd most important), the Board, the community and investors informed about your current thinking?

I believe 100% that companies which communicate regularly with employees in a transparent manner are going to win the war for talent. Video is ideal for communicating in a scalable, global fashion. You should assume that video messages created for intracompany consumption will find their way outside of your company. Therefore, construct your message with this in mind. One transparent message for consumption by all is the best way to ensure consistency across audience cohorts.

Young users want to watch a short video, swipe right or left and engage through voice.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon have open-sourced their core machine-learning layers as well as basic AI-services, so it’s easy to deploy AI-powered voice assistants and to capture those front-end customer interactions in your machine learning layer.

Content Is King Content is King to quote Sumner Redstone. At CEORater we spend a fair amount of time thinking about content. Over the past 24 months we have considered the following for our platform: 1.) video streaming of earnings calls with associated analytics 2.) employee video reviews 3.) business news (original and third-party) and…

Everyone Wants Their 15 Minutes of Fame

It’s a primary reason why Instagram “Stories” are so popular. That and the feature’s ease-of-use. Instagram has created an engaging, almost frictionless user experience that enables anyone to vlog their life in a series of micro videos with a 24-hour shelf life – i.e “Stories”. Stories is the platform feature that single-handedly kneecapped Snap before its March 2017 IPO (we reviewed in our piece about CEO overreach). We covered the “Stories” topic in episodes 58 and 67 of our CEORater Podcast.

Mobile Devices that Best Leverage Social Media Platforms Will Win

The “Stories” feature matters not only for social media companies but also for mobile phone OEMs as consumers increasingly record and consume mobile video. Therefore, mobile phone camera features, in-phone storage (external storage devices add friction to the user experience) and battery life will increasingly matter.

Here’s a look at four mobile phones across attributes:

Platform Cloud Vendors Also Win

Facebook stores Instagram videos. Google stores Snap’s content. Expect cloud service leader AWS (Netflix on AWS) to make its mark as companies that were built on top of AWS roll out video content (Amazon/Open Tube?)

AT&T Ought to Be Allowed to Acquire Time Warner “As Is” AT&T (T) ought to be allowed to acquire Time Warner (TWX) “as is” (earlier today AT&T extended the deal close deadline to April 22 2018). It is puzzling why the Justice Department would push back on the deal. We recently covered the topic in…